The woman was threatened with being gang raped if she did not allow her daughter to go out. The teenager was so desperate to protect her mum that she put a knife to her wrists and threatened to slash them in order to get out and return to her abusers.

Judge Geoffrey Marson QC, who presided over the first two trials, described the abuse as having a 'profound' affect on Girl L and her family.

Her mum agreed, adding that her son would stay up all night waiting on his older sister coming home and fall asleep the next day in school and her husband took weeks off work to temporarily take their daughter out of the country for as long as they could afford to.

But the determined woman also described her lengthy campaign for action - from carrying out undercover surveillance on the rapists with her husband and feeding the police intelligence to talking to the press and MP Barry Sheerman.

It's tempting to describe her as incredibly brave, but her story is about much more than bravery - it's about survival.

Recalling an incident involving Mohammed Imran Ibrar, also known as Bully, Girl L's mum said: "Greater Manchester Police had come to visit us when it first started and asked where she'd been that night.

"She said she'd been with these girls who had introduced her to these men and she had driven around with them.

The mum-of-three described her son as 'tormented' as he waited up all night for his sister to come home and said he would be put in isolation in school for falling asleep in class.

Girl L would come home drunk and/or drugged and her parents would take it in turns to sit in her bedroom with her and lay her on her side.

Her mum said: "The police would just come speak to her. Some would victim blame by saying, 'You know your mum and dad's worried about you, you need to be staying in on an evening' - like it's her fault.

"The blame always was on my daughter or us as a family, which was awful.

Then it just got to the stage where it was getting so out of control that we'd seen her getting thrown out of a taxi early hours one morning just before 6am.

She'd been missing with another girl and I just thought, 'I can't do this anymore'.

Her neck was just completely black with bites, scratches up her arms and legs, one shoe missing.